Bishops urge Gove to drop admissions cap for new academies

English and Welsh bishops agree to 'resist any pressure' to establish such schools

The bishops’ conference has urged the Government to drop its rule that a new academy school or free school can only select half of its pupils on the grounds of faith.

During their plenary meeting the bishops agreed that a 50 per cent cap on pupils chosen because of their faith was “not a secure basis” for a Catholic school.

In a statement released today the bishops’ conference said it will urge dioceses “to resist any pressure to establish a school on that basis”.

Last year the Education Secretary Michael Gove said he had no intention of relaxing the 50 per cent cap.

Catholic schools that are not free schools or new academy schools are allowed to select all of their pupils on the grounds of faith.

The Catholic Church runs one free school, St Michael’s in Truro, which is bound by the 50 per cent cap.

Dennis Sewell, chairman of a new free school in Clapham, south London, called Trinity Academy, said last month he had been “alarmed by the vehement hostility” of Church officials to Mr Gove’s reforms. His school, inspired by a Catholic ethos, will also be limited by the 50 per cent cap.

Statement by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales:

The bishops’ conference recognises that, in the circumstances prevailing in England and Wales, the conditions required to ensure a distinctive Catholic education remain the ownership of the school or college site, the appointment of the majority of governors, admissions arrangements, the RE curriculum and its inspection, worship and the employment of staff.

Accordingly, the bishops’ conference takes the view that the imposition of a 50 per cent cap on the control of admissions is not a secure basis for the provision of a Catholic school and urges dioceses to resist any pressure to establish a school on that basis.

The bishops’ conference mandates the Catholic Education Service to continue to press the government and politicians to modify this policy so that it no longer places a disproportionate disadvantage on the Catholic community.

A further story on the bishops’ plenary meeting this week will be available shortly.

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RoJtM

Most Catholic schools have long since been authentically Catholic and this rule if imposed would effectively spell the end of them!

la Catholic state

The Catholic FreeSchool due to open in South London will prove very interesting. It will have only 50 per cent Catholic pupils, but that is already the case in many existing Catholic schools. I sincerely hope it will present the Catholic Faith in its fullness to all children. The last thing we need is more Catholic in name only schools!

SimonS

This rule applies only to new schools.

The government has taken the position that if you wish to start a school using public money, then public priorities (namely providing education for all, rather than your own chosen group) must be considered.

Existing Catholic schools, or any independently financed new schools will be unaffected.

RoJtM

Thanks…I wonder how long before this will apply to existing schools also.

Hennergogs

We started very many schools using our own money and this public money is ours too. These children would be at a school anyway so in no way are we beholden to “public money” smokescreen.

“Not your own chosen group” works both ways (would you include schools like Eton and Winchester in this?). It seems to me the cap is just an attempt to spread the successful ethos of Catholic schools further into the community or a sop to keep politically motivated extremists a bit quieter.

Hennergogs

There’s an old saying – if it aint broke don’t fix it. This cap is not the suggestion of Catholic education so Michael Gove should drop it.

Paul

bring back the angelus

Baw

I hear the new Trinity free school will be bringing back the angelus.

Guest

There are lots of rural areas where there are insufficient Catholic children to warrant an entire Catholic secondary school. As a result, huge stretches of the country have no Catholic schools at all. 50% Catholic free schools would be just the ticket, bringing Catholic education to places where there is none available. There was, for instance, no state Catholic secondary in Cornwall until the free school opened last year. The bishops are being very short-sighted. I suspect they have been led astray by the left-wingers in the Catholic Education Service, who are bound to be trying to sabotage Michael Gove’s policies.

whytheworldisending

Gove is discriminating against Christians, Jews and Muslims. He is not imposing a 50% cap on the number of atheists which can be admitted to non-faith schools. Even if he were, his mickey mouse “policy-making” represents an unecessary interference with freedom of conscience thought and religion – not to mention with the right to privacy and family life. What does he propose a school does when it reaches its 50% limit?

A pupil enters a “free” Catholic school as an atheist but soon decides to become a Catholic. Does Gove believe that the Governors should permanently exclude that pupil with effect from the date of their baptism in order to avoid exceeding Gove’s arbitrary anti-religious barrier of 50%? How would that make the child feel?

Gove seems to be blissfully unaware that he is in danger of emotionally abusing children with this stupid nonsense. His hostile attitude to traditional religious families and children from such families raises safeguarding issues.

It is Gove and his madcap schemes that governors, teachers, parents and children need to be free of. He should be permanently excluded from government.

Agnus

The 50% Cap is extremely restrictive of Religious Freedom, what a farce is the rule of separation of Church and State. These criminals stop at nothing to violate THEIR site of the agreement. We should NEVER have agreed to such a betrayal of God. We should NEVER compromise the Truth, evil finds such abhorrent ways of silencing us. We should obey Our Lord, ACCEPT that we have been prepared for these attrocities, and truly accept that Our Lady has frequently tried to prevent this situation from manifesting itself by appearing at various locations to urge us NOT to offend God by abandoning Her Son. Let’s learn from our mistakes, and stop voting in Governments that are seeking to wipe Christianity off the face of the Earth. Pope Saint Pius X wrote MUCH prophetically about this situation, inspired by Our Lord.

See here, ANOTHER warning from the Immaculate Mother of God silenced.

The Prophecies for the 20th Century known as “Our Lady of Good Success” or “Quito” received in the 17th Century by a Nun Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres who is bodily incorrupt. (Accepted by the Holy Catholic Church as being worthy of belief.)

In the 20th Century……..”the Sacrament of Matrimony… will be attacked and deeply profaned… The Catholic spirit will rapidly decay; the precious light of the Faith will gradually be extinguished… Added to this will be the effects of secular education, which will be one reason for the dearth of priestly and religious vocations.”

“The Sacrament of Holy Orders will be ridiculed, oppressed, and despised… The Devil will try to persecute the ministers of the Lord in every possible way; he will labor with cruel and subtle astuteness to deviate them from the spirit of their vocation and will corrupt many of them. These depraved priests, who will scandalize the Christian people, will make the hatred of bad Catholics and the enemies of the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church fall upon all priests…

Prophecies of Our Lady of Lasalette 1846 (Accepted by the Holy Catholic Church as being worthy of belief, yet the chosen visionaries are much maligned and hated by Modern Clergy (as are those visionaries at Our Lady’s apparitions in Garabandel, Spain during the 1960’s) as it is THEMSELVES that are accused of negligence in the practice of their Sacred Ministeries, and the neglect of Prayer, Fasting and Penance on the part of themselves and the whole of Mankind.

“All the civil governments will have one and the same plan, which will be to abolish and do away with every religious principal, to make way for materialism, atheism, spiritualism and vice of all kinds.

The true faith to the Lord having been forgotten, each individual will want to be on his own and be superior to people of same identity, they will abolish civil rights as well as ecclesiastical, all order and all justice would be trampled underfoot and only homicides, hate, jealousy, lies and dissension would be seen without love for country or family.”

That is of course absurd. He would only be discriminating if he prevented them from going to non-religious schools, which he is not. No-one is prevented from going to a non-faith school regardless of their beliefs so how can there be discrimination in any way relating to that?

The only discrimination here is those church schools receiving 90% of their build costs and 100% of their ongoing costs from the taxpayer while simultaneously restricting their intake to those of their own faith.

I am sure that if the Catholic church, or any other religious organisation, paid for the schools themselves no-one would have any room to complain.

Gove is quite vehemently pro-faith. A very brief read of the story of St Richard Reynolds in Twickenham would show you that. Evidently he’s clearly not pro-faith enough for your good self in that he merely ensured that schools can set up in a certain way to ensure they are exempt from the 50% rule fairly trivially.

Pay for these schools yourselves rather than holding hands out and expecting the taxpayer to subsidise the dissemination of your beliefs and no-one will have any room for complaint.

No-one in their right mind opposes your right to a faith, however it’s absolutely right for those of us who don’t share it to oppose the influence of faith on our daily lives, school admissions being an obvious one where a child living next door to a school their parents’ taxes help pay for can be forced to travel for however long because their parents have the wrong belief system.

If you think that segregation and intentional inconveniencing of others in this manner to preserve the ‘purity’ of taxpayer funded schools is fine all I can say is that that’s very Christian of you

When secular schools begin to exclude religious students from their rolls then you can cry discrimination. Until that happens your comment is absurd and is a great advertisement for secularism as a whole given the sense of entitlement to preferential treatment over those without faith that flows through it.

Suggest you go start a lawsuit against Gove if you think he’s being discriminatory. Do try not to get offended by the laughter you’ll receive from the solicitor.

whytheworldisending

Atheism (What you call secular) is the biggest drain of all on the tax payer. For example, over half of the NHS budget goes on treating self-inflicted diseases caused by sinful behaviours, such as alcoholism, drug abuse, and promiscuity – particularly of the homosexual kind. That diverts funds away from treatment of good-living and God-fearing people and ultimately leads to their premature deaths due to an over strectched NHS. Christian education pays for itself by reducing the burden on the NHS, and on the police and on the prison service, but having said that, nobody sends children to a faith school to learn their faith. They send them there to avoid picking up the sort of evil nonsense that leads to the aforementioned maladies. Sadly children of atheists tend to worship money, just like their parents and the love of money is as we all know, the root of all evil. Your appeal to the “taxpayer” and the childish faith you seem to have in all things “Legal” is telling.

Carl Thomas

If this is the model of Christianity in the 21st century it really is no surprise at all that church attendance is going down.

Firstly atheism and secularism are completely different things. There are many people of faith who believe in a secular state.

I have no childish faith in the legal system, I am merely obliged to follow it, as we all are. It is the best we have and something we should all be equal in front of, regardless of race, creed, or religion.

If I may point out, I have at no point been abusive or judgemental beyond a single sentence where I question how ‘Christian’ it is to promote segregation.

May I ask where you are given the right to judge me, my children, or anyone else because we do not adhere to your values?

May I ask what your Lord Jesus Christ would’ve thought about your assertion that, rather than caring for those who are ill due to alcoholism or drug abuse and trying to cure them of this malady, they should be left to die so that they don’t divert resources away from ‘good-living and God-fearing’ people?

May I ask where you evidence is that a Christian education significantly changes crime rates, relative to secular schools with the same intake profiles?

Lastly may I ask for the evidence of your claim that atheists tend to worship money? I can assure you that I do not. I would have absolutely no qualms with the total abolition of money tomorrow if it meant all could live a comfortable and happy life.

It is perhaps telling that the atheist of the two of us desires purely equal treatment for those with faith and those without, while the person who presumably believes themselves to hold good Christian values advocates letting the sick die because they divert resources from those who share those same values, and posts a series of frankly abusive judgements on those who do not share their values.

Based on your post I would find you a sanctimonious and unpleasant person to speak to. I would make a point of avoiding further contact with you if you were to speak to me in this manner.

I am sure that that is not the way you meant to come across and that, like all good Christians, you remember the words in Luke 19:10 – ‘For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.’ and would agree with them rather than leaving the lost to die, denied medical treatment.

I have read the King James Bible from cover to cover, as I believe every person should. The impression I received from it is that if there were a God they may recoil from such vitriol, especially when it is dealt in Their name.

I am sorry we couldn’t have a more reasonable dialogue.

whytheworldisending

Dialogue? Making bald assertions in a questionable manner and then whinging when someone replies in kind is just evidence that you’re on the wrong site.